I could only look at her numbly. I pushed my chair back and made my way to the stable in a sort of trance, feeling undone. How many dozens of hours had I sat on Lady D’s carpet, drinking her tea and soaking up her words, never knowing she was ill or even weak? Maybe I hadn’t known her at all, not really, and now she was gone. I wouldn’t ever see her again. I’d never even said goodbye.
In the shabby stable office, I found Buller napping and dropped to my knees, rubbing my face against his brindled coat. He was completely deaf now, and because he hadn’t heard me he was startled—but also happy. He sniffed me everywhere and licked my face, wriggling all the way to his tail. When he flopped to the beaten earth again, I lay my head on him, looking around at my father’s things—his desk with the thick black studbook, his riding helmet and crop, a plate full of pipe ash, yellowed newspapers, and the calendar on the wall. There should have been important dates circled in red. The stable should have been alive with activity, but it was as still as a Nandi burial ground. I had finally come back for good, and yet Green Hills barely felt like home any more. Would it again?
After a while my father came in and looked at us there on the floor. “I know she meant the world to you.” He paused. “This is a lot to come home to, but sooner or later it will all get sorted.”
I was desperate to believe he was telling the truth, that the worst of our troubles were behind us, that everything that had tumbled into chaos could still be set right again. I wanted that as much as I had ever wanted anything. “The war won’t last for ever, will it?” I asked him, my voice catching.
“It can’t,” he replied. “Nothing does.”
When the March rains fell over the plains and the ragged face of the escarpment, six million yellow flowers cracked open all at once. Red-and-white butterflies, the ones that looked like peppermint sticks, flashed in twists against the sparkling air.
But in 1919, the rains didn’t come. Not the soaking April storms when one inky cloud could levitate for hours spilling everything it had, and not the short daily November rains that winked on and off as if they ran on a system of pulleys. Nothing came that year, and the plains and the bush all went sand coloured. Everywhere you looked seemed to shrink and curdle with dryness. Along the banks of Lake Nakuru, the waterline receded and collapsed, leaving powdery green mould and strange curls of dried lichen. The villages were silent, their herds emaciated. My father scoured the horizon line like every other up-country farmer within a hundred miles of Nairobi and saw no smudge of cloud anywhere, or even a single shadow on the sun.
I was sixteen now and full of restless feelings. In his study, I watched my father cup his chin solemnly and stare into his ledger with hooded, bloodshot eyes. Scotch before breakfast, neat.
I leaned over the back of his chair to tuck my chin between his neck and shoulder. He smelled like hot cotton, like the sky. “You should go back to bed.”
“I haven’t been to bed.”
“No, I suppose you haven’t.”
The night before, he and Emma (I had taken to calling her that since I’d come home) had been invited to a small evening party in Nakuru, racing types, I suspected. I didn’t understand how Emma kept herself up so well on the farm. Though lined and softened, her skin was still fair. She was slim, and her clothes moved well when she walked—a thing I might have managed to pull off if I’d stayed at school with the other girls instead of here, in the middle of the bush, in slacks and dusty knee-high boots.
“You really could make more of an effort, Beryl,” Emma had said before they left for Nakuru. “Come to town with us.”
I was better off at home. After they roared down the dirt track in Daddy’s Hudson, I tucked in by the cedar-wood fire to read, liking and needing the quiet. But not long after I’d gone to bed, they were home again, whispering fiercely to each other as they crossed the yard from the car. He’d done something or she thought he had, their voices growing louder and more tense, and I wondered what had set them off. Sometimes things in town could turn volatile if Emma felt snubbed. She’d long been living openly as my father’s common-law wife, but as I grew older I saw things that had been invisible to me before, like how even if she and Daddy seemed ready to throw off the usual conventions or at least ignore them, the colony at large couldn’t. Many of the neighbouring farmers’ wives had effectively shut Emma out. Even in town, as I’d learned from Dos, the arrangement was seen as disgraceful, no matter how much time had passed, no matter how conservative they seemed in other ways.
But if tensions from the outside world stirred the pot at home, at least Emma seemed ready to drop any nonsense about my needing a governess or schooling. Her efforts now were aimed at my manners and appearance—such as they were. She was forever trying to get me to wash more, to wear a frock instead of trousers. Gloves were essential if I ever wanted to keep my hands nice, and didn’t I know that any proper young lady wore a hat outdoors?